Podcast Description

It’s no doubt that the acceleration into an online world was pushed forward dramatically by the 2020 pandemic.

This Black Friday weekend showed clear proof that more people are buying online than ever before.

But is Amazon the only place for your e-commerce brand to flourish right now, in 2021, and beyond?

Listen as I discuss the growing and changing state of the online world with the president of ManageByStats, Curtis Johnson.

 

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Growing E-commerce Through the Pandemic

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Podcast Transcription

Welcome to the Facebook marketing Ninja podcast.

My name is Jimmy. I’m the Associate Creative Director for Manuel Suarez here at AGM.

Hit subscribe to stay up-to-date on the best tips and tricks in the social marketing world.

Today’s episode title is Growing E-commerce Through the Pandemic.

It’s no doubt that the acceleration into an online world has pushed forward dramatically by the 2020 pandemic.

This Black Friday weekend showed clear proof that more people are buying online than ever before.

But is Amazon the only place for your e-commerce brand to flourish right now in 2021 and beyond?

Listen in as Manuel discusses the growing and changing state of the online world with the President of ManageByStats, Curtis Johnson.

 

Growing E-commerce Through the Pandemic

I’m excited about today.

Last week it was Thanksgiving. I hope you guys had a great one.

Well, in this particular week, we’re going to have a great, great guest, a friend of mine, the President of ManageByStats.

And if you guys don’t know what ManageByStats is, it is an Amazon software. It’s built for Amazon sellers. And it’s a great tool that I’ve been using for many, many years.

It goes back to probably 2016. When I started learning about this platform myself and I was introduced to it. All right.

So I can tell you that this guy knows what he’s talking about. I’ve been in front of him for quite a while already. I’ve helped him on his company.

 

And their company, ManageByStats…

They help Amazon sellers leverage some of the tools and opportunities of the world of Amazon.

And I thought that it would be a smart thing to bring him here to you guys to talk about the world of Amazon and e-commerce, and what’s happening in this environment and what’s happening in 2021 and beyond because there’s been a lot of things that have happened in the 2020 year.

One of those things is that there’s been a massive acceleration of the Amazon platform, which is crazy to say because Amazon was already massively accelerated, but what’s happened in 2020 has gone beyond what anybody dreamed inside the Amazon executive offices.

They have massively taken over the world of the internet.

There are crazy things happening right now, for example, when you look at the overall e-commerce, the overall internet, the numbers on the world, the numbers on the USA, every single dollar spent on the internet, every single dollar of billions and billions of dollars spent online right now, 50 cents are being spent on Amazon, which tells you how big of a deal this platform is.

I’m a big fan of it. I don’t talk about it enough. It is at the starting of my own entrepreneurial roadmap. And because of that, I want to give you guys more data about that because I’ve seen a lot of people recently in the world of business have to transition over to the internet because otherwise, they would not make it.

 

Businesses that did not adapt to the internet world

are closing every single day more and more and more.

 

There’s expansion going on. The economy seems to be picking up. There’s good news in between all the darkness and all those things are happening only for one reason.

 

And that’s because

we have access to the internet.

 

The internet has made it possible for us to survive through a pandemic like this.

Imagine the world in 2002, 2004, before the era of YouTube, Facebook, the internet. Platforms like Shopify, Amazon, et cetera.

Before these things really were taking over the world, imagine going over a pandemic like the one that we’re going through right now.

 

We would not make it.

 

We would be on a massive economic meltdown.

Because of the internet, we have

• Made it.

• Kept on moving forward.

• Survived.

Businesses have flourished. Many of us have flourished. The ones that took advantage of the opportunities did actually expand.

In my case, 2020 has been a year of massive expansion business-wise.

Some people ask me, “How the heck did you accomplish that?”

Well, there’s been a lot of expansion on my NaturalSlim brand. A lot of expansion on my agency services, my knowledge in the world of marketing, our knowledge, in my teams has been greatly increased in value.

And because of that, I’m excited to talk to you guys about these opportunities.

Today I have a special expert that’s going to help us talk about that particular subject of Amazon. All right.

So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen now with Curtis Johnson from MBS. And we’re going to be talking about this world of Amazon right now.

 

Manuel Interviews the President of ManageByStats

Manuel: So, Curtis, can you hear me and see me well, man?

Curtis: Yes, I can hear you loud and clear. How about me?

Manuel: Oh, I can hear you loud and clear, man. Sounds good.

Curtis: Perfect. Perfect.

Manuel: I was at your studio. I think it was last week already.

Curtis: Yeah.

Manuel: What was it two weeks ago or was it last week?

Curtis: You know, with Thanksgiving, it’s really hard to remember anything that happened throughout Thanksgiving.

Manuel: I know. Right, yeah, yeah.

Curtis: I’m still recovering from the food coma. But yeah, no, I’m really happy to be on your show. We had an amazing value from you last week, two weeks ago, whenever it was. So, very happy to be here.

Manuel: Wow, super cool, man. I know that obviously you are on top of this incredible software called ManageByStats and I’m a big fan of. We’ll get to talk about a little bit more of some of the developments on the platform over the years.

Curtis: For sure.

Manuel: And what’s the opportunity on that particular software right now that you are recommending your sellers to utilize. We’ll talk about that some more later on.

But I think that people here are going to be interested in what are you seeing, Curtis, in this world of Amazon today? What’s going on? There are so many questions that I have because you are living in this world way deeper than I am myself.

Because I’m more like on the e-commerce world and more on the internet and social media world.

You’re so deep into the Amazon world that I know you have a lot of data to share with us. So I want you to tell us all about it.

 

First of all,

What has 2020 meant for ManageByStats?

For Amazon sellers, for Amazon in general?

What can you say about that?

Curtis: Well, 2020 has been, I think we would all agree the weirdest year in recent history.

For Amazon, okay. There’s the pandemic. Now, we can look at it from an emotional perspective, but since we’re business owners, I’m sure most of the people watching this are business owners.

We should really look at it from an analytical perspective because the pandemic, especially when it comes to

Amazon

It has forced people, whether they like to, or not to, you know, gravitate to the internet to purchase things.

So if anyone hasn’t looked at just Amazon stats in the year of 2020, that paints a pretty damn good picture.

You can’t escape the fact that their stock has skyrocketed because of, you know, hugely increasing sales.

And, we can even look at Black Friday.

Black Friday, Amazon did, or e-commerce did $10.8 billion on just Black Friday, which is a complete record. We’re talking 15% greater than last year.

Manuel: It’s a little bit more than what I did. I did $250,000 that day. So just,

Curtis: Yeah, just a hair greater. Now, interesting thing, and this is…. Okay, so especially for anyone who’s on there, that is strictly speaking Amazon, anyone who’s on this… listening to this podcast, most people are used to the statistic that 50% of all gains in that arena come from Amazon.

Very interestingly enough, for Black Friday, it was only 20%.

So we have other competition building around. So what is the…

Manuel: Wow.

Curtis: Yeah, what’s the lesson there? The lesson there is… Yes, HAVE YOUR STRONG AMAZON BUSINESS.

And, you know, Phillip Jepsen, the founder of MBS, and I have talked about this a couple of times, you want to start on a platform like Amazon, because you have certain criteria that make it very easy.

The entry is simpler than other platforms.

But once you get that really established, you know, START BROADENING YOUR HORIZONS because the game is spreading past Amazon exclusively, which is, which is a really, really good thing.

Competition is a great thing across the boards.

Manuel: Right, so entry is easier. That’s an absolute fact. And I hadn’t talked about that point enough.

I always talk about the fact that they have the audience and you don’t.

Curtis: That’s right.

Manuel: They have it, and you don’t. So you’re leveraging the fact that they’ve been building that audience for many, many years. And because of that, it becomes easier for you to get people to pay attention.

If you start, and I can tell you myself, I am a big social media marketing guy. I build a lot of e-commerce. I have a lot of data, and I will tell you if I, if Curtis was not right on this, I will tell you, you know Curtis, I’m seeing other data.

If you are thinking about starting a brand and you have products that you can sell on the internet, it is an absolute, no brainer, AMAZON IS YOUR STARTING POINT.

Because they already have a hundred million monthly unique buyers. Is it a hundred or is it like 120 by now? I don’t, I don’t even know.

Curtis: Well, I don’t know what it is today. I’m sure it’s drastically higher than we last checked.

It is in that range, but yeah, it just, they grow so much faster than every other company, but the fact that you know, now they, for at least Black Friday, they only encapsulated 19% of the overall market is a good thing because it means that more platforms are maturing just like Amazon matures every day.

 

And one thing that a lot of people should think with is that.

Amazon PPC is maturing a lot.

 

It’s not like, Phillip tells me about when he got into the game back in 2014 and you could literally just pay pennies on the dollar for ads and guaranteed return, it’s not that simple anymore.

A tip also, like I’m going to, I have a couple of tips that I’ll give you guys, but it’s definitely a matured platform over, you know, even five years ago, even a year ago.

Manuel: Right. Right. Well, something that… Just to go back to what you said, Curtis on which was very surprising to me that 19% of sales were on Amazon and the rest were on other places.

That’s incredible!

 

That tells you that there’s been an evolution into other platforms because the Amazon opportunity, if you go back to 2012, 2013, all these sellers started looking at that opportunity.

And they went really deep in it because they already had a large audience and they had something called “credibility”.

When they saw that Amazon smile, they immediately trusted that smile and they would buy products that were on the platform.

That became like a huge deal.

It makes sense that Amazon themselves went really deep into that relationship with what they call merchants, third party sellers, people like you or me that want to put their products on the platform.

The rest of the population that are not marketers, that are not business owners, they did not really understand that relationship.

We take it for granted because we understand what it is.

 

And we know that these products that are being sold

are not being really sold by Amazon.

 

They’re really being sold by people like us in our garages, in our homes in, you know, we’re not, that’s the way it was.

I mean, you know, the story of my bedsheets brand, Curtis?

Curtis: Yeah.

Manuel: I literally just took another brand. I took a label out and placed my own label that I printed on machine and printed a bunch of these labels and started studying a lot.

And we made it into a multi-million dollar business.

That was the Amazon opportunity. That was not really possible on the e-commerce site.

Because if you wanted to start on your own site, let’s say that you want to go to WordPress or Magento or BigCommerce or WooCommerce or Shopify or whatever the case may be, it takes a lot of money and energy and time to make it successful.

You have to have some big, big dollars to go down that route. Also, you gotta have patience and a lot of us did not have patience.

Now, what I can tell you right now in the world, I love this conversation. This can be such a heated conversation, but I can tell you, it’s very important for you guys to keep this in mind.

What I can tell you right now is that for the rest of this year and 2021, there’s going to start being a difference of like the entrepreneurs that make it, because the ones that make it on Amazon are going to have to be more knowledgeable.

It’s like… What Curtis was just saying right now, at the beginning of the Amazon evolution with third-party sellers like us, it was so easy to do advertising and sell your products and rank products and get reviews.

Right now, it’s a challenge.

So right now it’s all about the knowledge that you get, the group that you connect with, the software to utilize, platforms like ManageByStats that is going to give you some more help and some support so you can take advantage of these opportunities.

 

Because right now,

not every seller is going to make it.

 

If you guys think that the easiest path towards making money and being able to drink piña coladas at the beach is just getting started on Amazon selling one or two products.

It’s not going to be the route because it does take a lot of work.

 

But you also have to stay educated

What’s going to happen in 2021 and beyond is that the smart marketer, the one that is actually taking advantage of knowledge, and ninja strategies, and opportunities, and all these things are the ones that are going to make it in this particular environment.

Curtis: Yeah.

Manuel: Otherwise you will struggle.